The Future is Tribal

In the half a decade since the Covid pandemic, countries have turned more insular – protecting their own. Within countries, the political centrists seem a dying breed as voters retreat into groups that reinforce their beliefs. Human conflicts have escalated, and defence spending has suddenly fired up massively.

Sitting just two miles from MIT’s main campus, we stare across a boardroom table the size of a small ice rink. The sci-fi toys under the enormous flatscreen TV downplays the weight of decisions that have been made in that room. “China’s innovations on the AI front are extremely impressive, and underestimated by most”, says the sector specialist a few months before the DeepSeek quake. “Trump and Xi both see this frontier as a national security priority”, he continues.

Their team’s view late last year was that white-collar adoption was already here, increasing rapidly but, they had a somewhat contrarian expectation that blue collar jobs were equally at risk. Humanoid robots, they believe, will be the natural progression which will see AI integrated with robotics to fulfil almost any task a human can master. A lot to grasp for their South African guests who were raised believing that robots are poles with three lights that direct traffic at intersections.

Humanoid robots are not waiting for us somewhere in the future. It’s, or rather, they are already here. Nvidia, being sensitive to our fears, defines them as “general-purpose, bipedal robots modelled after the human form factor and designed to work alongside humans to augment productivity. They're capable of learning and performing a variety of tasks, such as grasping an object, moving a container, loading or unloading boxes, and more”.

iRobot was founded by MIT in 1990. In September 2002 they released Roomba, the company’s first autonomous vacuum cleaner. Yes, that’s the round, flat, cat-mobile that runs around cleaning the floor when its owners are sleeping. The cumulative human-hours re-allocated from vacuuming to doing more high functioning tasks (or watching Netflix) is mind-blowing – remember it’s been nearly a quarter of a century. iRobot have sold more than 50 million robots. Conservatively, at 1 hour of vacuuming a week, it has produced nearly 200,000 years of vacuuming… per year. Yes, you should have bought Netflix stock at $ 1 when Roomba was released. It is trading at $ 1320 today.

There is another iRobot, which didn’t have nearly as good a return on investment, but is very relevant to this discussion: the movie starring Will Smith. Set in Chicago in 2035, humanoids are everywhere and living alongside their human counterparts. This integration of cutting-edge hardware and superhuman intelligence makes for a formidable workforce and, ups labour competition. But to what end? In the movie humans ultimately revolt against the robots as survival instincts kick in.

That same instinct is prevalent on tertiary education campuses globally. Within two generations, the world has graduated from a place where a university degree was seen as setting an individual apart, to today, where it is simply the norm. Fierce competition for the best (read, “highest paying”) careers is still rising, with specialisations, and super-specialisations seen as one of the last frontiers to distinguish oneself from the herd. Now, not even that is a certainty. AI is effectively aggregating all human knowledge, across career paths, and at super-specialised levels. What’s frightening job seekers is the cost at which this is being delivered to employers or end users. That’s not great timing. The global student debt load is about to collide with a world where specialised knowledge is no longer a competitive advantage.

Youngsters making career choices today face an everchanging landscape. Perhaps the best advice one could offer school leavers is to invest in the people they encounter on their journey, whichever field they choose. Humans are relational, and this has been true for millennia. We band together in small groups, that form part of larger groups. We’ve all heard the phrase, “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know”. That seems a truism that hasn’t changed despite the vast amount of knowledge we have amassed over the last century. As competition ramps up, we humans will do what we’ve always done – that is, look to each other for help.

Be nice. The tribe has spoken.